Viewing by Years, Months, Days, and All Photos

In this video, we’re going to take a look at our Days, Months, and Years. This is how we can view our different photos and videos in the Photos app and all photos. This is how we can view all of our photos. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m in my Photos app, and if we go over to the left, you’re going to see I have my library selected. When I have my library selected, what I’m able to do is view my photos by Year, Months, and Days and view all of my photos. This only shows when I’m looking at my library here. If I go to my favorites, I can no longer view them by Years, Months, or Days. I can no longer view all of my photos because I’m looking at my favorites. When I go to an album, let’s look at this album here, I can no longer view them by Year, Month, or Day. Those views are only available when you’re looking at your library. So let’s go ahead and select my library. And now I can view them by Years, Months, or Days, as well as All Photos. So let’s take a closer look at these four different ways of viewing our photos and videos.

We’re first going to look at Years. When I click on Years, the Photos app will group all of my photos by year. So I want to see all of my photos from 2013. All I need to do is just double-click on this, and now it has shown me all of my photos by month. Specifically, it takes me to the year 2013 because that’s the year that I double-clicked on when I was viewing it by years; here are all my photos from May of 2013.

So what do you think’s going to happen when I double click on a month here? Well, let’s find out. I double-click on it; it takes me to Days. So now I’m looking at all of my photos by Days. Now it is still not showing me all of my photos. If we look here at March 13, I have four photos here showing. I have one of the lizard and three other photos here, but I may have taken more photos on March 13.

To view all of my photos, what I would need to do is go to All Photos. When we view them by day, the photos app will look at your photos and videos and group them by what it feels are the best photos that represent that day. And again, this can be photos and videos. So again, let’s go back over to Years. We’re going to select a different year. Let’s just swipe up and let’s go to 2019; I double-click on it, now I can view all of those months from 2019. Here we have March 2019. And when I swipe down, I have February of 2019, and it’s showing a video. When I double click on this, it’s going to take me to all of the photos in February of 2019, but it’s going to group them by day. And again, it is showing me the videos. And I can swipe up and down to see all of the photos from that month. Now I do not have many photos here from February 2008, so it just shows me the next ones are March, and the previous one is in December also. It was not going to show me again all of the photos and videos from that day. I know I took more photos and videos on February 28.

Now, if I want to open up any one of these to get a closer look, I just double-click on it. Let’s take a look at these elephants here, and we can see it opened up to that photo. To go back, we just click on the left arrow here, and it takes us back to our days. So that’s our Years, Months, and Days.

Let’s take a closer look at All Photos. When I click on All Photos, it will show me all of my photos in my library here. Now there’s going to be one exception to that. You’ve heard me mention it before; we can hide photos and videos. When we hide them, it does hide them out of the library here. It puts them into a special album. I have a separate video on that, but basically, when you’re looking at all of your photos, you’re going to be able to look at all of your photos and all of your videos that are in your library. It does group them together so we can see we have June 22 to March 5. If I were to make these thumbnails smaller, it’s going to increase that spread. Now it includes photos from March to July. And when I swipe up, those dates will change so we can easily see what photos we’re looking at or what photos and videos we’re looking at just by going to the upper left-hand corner.

If you want to see how many photos and videos you have in your library, you just go down to the bottom. And you’re going to see a count of how many photos and videos you have. So I have 303 photos in this library, along with 31 videos.

The last thing I want to mention is we cannot change the sort order when we’re looking at all of our photos. It just puts them in chronological order. The newest photos will be at the bottom, while the oldest photos will be at the top.

So that’s a look at how we view our library by Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. We can only view it by Years, Months, and Days, as well as All Photos when we’re looking at our library. If we’re in an album, we can not use these selections. When we click on Years, it groups all of our photos and videos by year. Double click on a specific year; it opens up that year to months. You can easily scroll to see all of the photos and videos by month, within the year. And then if we double click on a Month, it brings us to our Day view. If we want to view all of our photos, we just go to the top and click on All Photos.

So that’s how we view our photos by Years, Months, and Days, as well as All of our photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac.